Session Abstract

Networking has revolutionized not only the way that we live our daily lives, but also the way in which we learn and how we practice science, leading to a growth in scientific discoveries. Achievements in scientific discovery have continued to increase over the past several decades through the exploitation of continually improving networks and computational systems. While the ability to use and share distributed data, computations, models, and instruments at unprecedented scales can enable transformative research, the complexity of scientific problems has increased as research has become more collaborative and interdisciplinary in nature. Scientists working on the same problem are often located at different locations, and increasingly, scientists and researchers in different disciplines collaborate on the same problem. Managing complex, collaborative projects across disciplinary and geographical boundaries, and sharing data and information across platforms and disciplines, is essential to the research process and key scientific discovery and understanding.
The proposed track session is focused on highlighting several applications of promising new collaboration tools and technologies for distributed research. Current research efforts in collaboration tools will be highlighted, with particular emphasis on the significance of creativity and vision when developing collaborative, geographically distributed cyberinfrastructure-enabled applications.
Collaborative science portals provide scientists with key resources and technologies to find data and services, create and share workflows, communicate findings, and visualize results. One of the examples that will be presented is Talkoot, developed by the University of Alabama in Huntsville, a novel open science environment that integrates many Web 2.0 technologies into a turnkey software appliance for constructing collaborative portals. The portal can be used to perform collaborative science and to communicate ideas and results, fostering the development of a collaborative online community to manage and share data, simulation and analysis workflows, and visualize and compare results. Talkoot accommodates a variety of existing services; including management of content and the content creation process, management of users and their roles, ability to import and export content, content syndication, personalized content based on user profiles, version management, archiving and publishing capabilities; and can be easily customized with additional simulation, analysis and visualization tools provided by different research communities. Customized modules for registering, creating, managing, discovering, tagging and sharing web services and workflows for science data processing, simulation, analysis and visualization have been created.